


Cause and Effect

by Straumoy



Series: Power Girl Short Stories [4]
Category: Power Girl (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drama, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 17:49:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5549762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Straumoy/pseuds/Straumoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Power Girl faces off with an ordinary man hell bent on getting revenge for the death of his relatives, which he blames on Power Girl. The two have a long talk, where Power Girl outlines the story and reason why the man's realtives suffered as they did by her hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cause and Effect

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: While confident in my writing, English isn't my first language. As such typos and grammatical errors will pop up every now and again. If you spot a particular glaring one, please let me know and I'll fix it.
> 
> This is a short story that came about from a writing prompt originally posted on www.reddit.com/writingpromts under the title "A superhero is faced with having to be held accountable for collateral damage done during one of his/her fights, where he/she killed an innocent family. A family member of the deceased seeks revenge. However since they are mortal they have no chance, but fight the hero anyway."
> 
> The prompt also had some Optional Rules:  
> \- You can use any hero you want, for example Superman, Thor, Deadpool or the hulk. OR create a hero yourself.  
> \- The person is related to the family in a close way like a child or brother of a deceased. They also have no powers, or any weird robotics that make them equal to the super hero, they are completely average verses the super human. They aren't meant to win through force, if win at all.  
> \- The death has to be accidental. You can choose if the hero even noticed or not that he or she was responsible for the death.  
> \- Either the mortal man announces why he is trying to kill the hero, or the superhero finds out they are being hunted, and investigate why themselves. Either way the hero is meant to face their accident before their demise or killing the mortal man.  
> \- Have fun!

Peering into the horizon, Power Girl saw a man walking back and forth in front of a car that had stopped in the middle of nowhere on some godforsaken New Mexico dust road, showing all the typical signs of stress and a build-up to panic. Picking up speed, she dived down and made a soft landing a few feet away from the rear of the car. 

“Sir? What seems to be the problem?” Power Girl asked before making a slow approach. 

“Oh thank goodness you're here!” The man flailed about as he spun on his heel. “I had to go to the bathroom and got locked out of my car, but my nephew...” 

Power Girl's blue eyes shot to her right and her iris gave up a dim glow as she looked through the car with her x-ray vision. True enough, a baby seat with a baby inside it was in the back seat of the car. Motioning with her hand, Power Girl asked the man to stand back before she punched through the window of the car and opened the door. A gush of warm air poured out from the inside of the car, Power Girl leaned inside to get the baby out when her super hearing caught the faint sound of sparks. The next second was all about an angry explosion screaming in her ears and furious flames dancing their destructive dance all around her. 

With a short, annoyed upward puff as if adjusting her bangs, Power Girl extinguished the flames on her face and parts of her hair. Reeking of burning gasoline, she calmly took a few steps away from the car before she started patting herself over to put out the fires that still clung to her formfitting suit. Sending an angry glare over at the man, Power Girl walked over with fast, long steps that did a poor job at masking her foul mood. 

“I'd punch you past Saturn if this was a real kid!” Power Girl hissed from behind clenched teeth before she threw a pitch black pile of melted plastic at the man's feet. 

“Screw you, you whore!” The man cried back, smashing his cellphone against the searing hot asphalt. “Of course the kid wasn't real! I'm not as heartless as you!” 

Putting up her finger as a single warning, Power Girl tried to contain her own anger, a character flaw that had haunted her since she first arrived on Earth. “Man, this is not...” 

Power Girl cut herself short as she felt the man's clenched fists pounding her torso and arms. This small, 4 feet and something tall man kept hitting her over and over again. It didn't hurt, at least not in the physical sense, not by a long shot. Yet there was something... behind each punch that jabbed at Power Girl. With each punch the next one grew a little weaker, until they finally stopped. The man grabbed Power Girl by her arms and held on with a grip of steel. Not that Power Girl felt the grip, she simply figured the man pinched on with every bit of strength he had based on how white his fingers and knuckles were. Also the trembling forearms was a dead give away. 

Their eyes met and the man was furious, it was as if Power Girl looked into two infernal pits of Hell rather than the eyes of a human. They were bloodshot from tears, dark brown in colour and as their fury faded, they both melted away to a sadness and despair Power Girl had seen all too often. This man had been left behind and he hated it, despised every waking second of it before pouring all of the blame, hate, loneliness and despair on Power Girl, in one last far flung hope that it would somehow be alright. 

The man buried his face in Power Girl's chest, sobs and heaving for air gradually climbed and rose in a crescendo of wailing above and beyond any comfort. Seeing these things on the news, where women and mothers, often in the middle east, wailed like this was one thing. Standing face to face with it was another. As much as she hated to admit it, this was a scene that Power Girl had grown familiar with to the point where her emotions had gone numb. On the low curves of the cries, whimpering pleas escaped; give them back, why didn't you save them, where were you, why me, why them... Minutes ticked away and it wasn't until they'd bleed out a pool of nearly an hour that the man calmed down. 

“There's a gas station a few kilometres down the road.” Power Girl said, looking to the horizon. “Walk with me.” 

Walking along the edge of the road, the somewhat odd couple kept on trucking in silence for a solid minute, the man clearly keeping his distance from Power Girl. Occasional glance in her direction betrayed that he found himself baffled and confused over how calm Power Girl remained, especially considering that he literally blew her to kingdom come a small hour ago. A long, warm, soothing breeze licked over their faces, scooping up handful of sand from the desert, toying with the grains before dropping them like a child who'd lost interest in its latest toy. Power Girl's red cape fluttered and snap like a flag protesting against the mast and thread holding it, eager to join the breeze in its sensual dance. 

“What was that all about?” She asked, giving her head a faint nod backwards to the still burning car. 

“I lost my sister and niece a couple of years back.” The man admitted, looking away as if he'd rather die than to look Power Girl in the face. 

“Dunseith?” Power Girl asked, her question came out more as an educated guess or a shot in the dark than something that she felt confident in. 

“Yeah, yeah. That's right, Dunseith.” The man sighed, taking a shuddered breath so he could improvise a dam to hold back his tears. “An SUV got kicked, punched or thrown half across town and landed in my sisters living room. She spent the last 34 minutes of her life crying her soul out over her dead daughter while bleeding out.” 

The words stopped, time slithered along like some patient snake, happily knowing its poison would sink in and cripple its prey. A random pebble on the road side became an innocent victim of the man's rage as he gave it a frustrated kick, sending it bouncing into the desert sand. With a short snort and a faint cough, Power Girl broke the silence though remained unaffected by the man's story. High in the blue sky above them, an airplane trekked onward to distant shores, one could “see” the sound of its engines lagging behind the plane itself as it crossed the blue ocean of the sky. 

“I know what it is like.” Power Girl said finally. 

“I find that hard to believe.” The man retorted, his coarse voice cracking and simmering like a veining fire. 

“I had a son.” Power Girl stated the fact as it was a simple thing. “Two years ago, he died.“ 

“Fucking bucket of bullshit.” The man grumbled with disgust. “A goddamn cunt like yourself can't even have kids! You're the last of you kind, a relic, a motherfucking dinosaur!” 

Calm, Power Girl remained clam as the surface of a lake on a dead quiet autumn morning. Alternatively if she did let the words get to her, she had one hell of a poker face. She could play the shoes, socks and underwear off all of Vegas with that kind of composure. Another few steps down the road followed before Power Girl nodded, agreeing with every word that the man had thrown at her. 

“There are billions of humans on Earth, so for a time there was this super slim chance of finding Mr Right, fuck his brains out and have kids of my own.” She started, counting on her fingers as if that would somehow help her crunch the numbers and narrow down her actual odds. “But Kryptonite made me infertile back in '94, so that ship sailed off without me even knowing it, until it was too late.” 

Her words were calm, yet they had this thin coat of sadness to them, dotted with regret. Cracks became apparent in Power Girl's composure in the form of a false smile, faint for sure, like soft cracks on a paint job. There was something about her eyes or rather, what her eyes were looking at or maybe for. A family she never had, the joy of motherhood denied, a sacrifice made for the greater good of humanity – possibly a sacrifice she would never had made if she actually had a say in the matter. 

“I lost my confidence after 9/11. I failed and America, thus the world hated me for it.” Power Girl's words dragged her mind reluctantly down a back alley of memory lane she didn't want to visit. “Things didn't get any better when 2003 reared its ugly face. The Bush administration wanted me to be on the forefront of the War on Terror, my ticket for redemption they said. Forgive and forget, make amends and all that horseshit.” 

A tall and thin dust devil caught Power Girl's attention, though she didn't give it much more than a bored glance as it twisted and wiggled itself along the desert floor. It too faded into oblivion without anyone or anything else giving two damns about its existence, as brief and pointless as it seemed. The soles underneath Power Girl's boots scraped and grinded the grains of sand against the asphalt for each step she took, the front of her sole seemed to do a small twist before she kicked forward to the next step. 

“Fuck that I said, war is not my thing. Never had been, never will be.” She carried on with her tale. “They persisted of course; froze my assets, drained my wallet and smeared me with tar and feathers in the media. Instead, I adopted Douglas, my son.” 

The smirk half melted into a smile, a genuine one this time around colored Power Girl's face. Even her eyes seemed warm, basking in fond memories. The man seemed to have composed himself and gave Power Girl's story all ears. At least now he was no longer looking away from her, instead he focused his eyes strongly on the road ahead. Not the horizon mind you, the road that was just a few feet in front of him – putting one foot in front of the other while listening, almost hanging on every word spoken. 

“Why? Why adopt?” The man's face widened a little for a small second at his own words before resuming a more serious and untrustworthy expression. 

“Guilt, despair, end of all hope, a whim, I have no idea what I'm doing... Take your pick, fuck if I know.” Power Girl actually shrugged, making a small hopelessly clueless gesture with her hands while making an equally clueless face. “Douglas had lost his dad in 9/11 and his mother... she'd crawled into every bottle in every bar before blowing her brains out with her dad's shotgun. Until death joins us was her reasoning, I guess. Poor soul didn't have any patience left in her bones.” 

“I was the first on the scene, the shotgun blast had caught my ears and I figured I go check it out.” She explained further, detailing the layout of the house, the blood, skull and brain splatter all over the egg white tiles in the bathroom, toddler Douglas standing in the hallway in his pyjamas crying his eyes out, thinking some monster under the bed had been mean to his mother. “Police arrived and did their thing, I stuck around and told them what I knew when little Douglas tugged at my cape, looking up at me he asked me if I could be his mommy now.” 

“Guess it could have been avoided if you'd just been on the job.” The man mumbled more to himself than to Power Girl. 

Power Girl on the other hand didn't give his words a second of her time, let alone attention. Instead she reached out sideways with her arm, holding the man back as she traced a 3 feet long rattle snake slither across the road in front of them. The snake didn't take any interest in the duo, wouldn't even give its tail a little shake to tell them to fuck off. A polite little shit, all things considered. Once it had fully crossed and was busy sliding further underneath a bush about a dozen feet away from the road, Power Girl resumed her walk with her assailant tagging along. 

“I gave up.” Power Girl said after they'd walked for several minutes of silence. “Hung up my cape, told Bush and that creepy asshole of a vice president to fuck off, packed my bags and left to raise Douglas.” 

“So what happened?” The man asked, his interest in Power Girl's story seemed to have flared up again. 

“Edward Snowden.” Power Girl, who all this time had been looking forward down the road, glancing to the horizon at her side, lowered her head and her fists curled up into a pair of crude orbs of trembling rage. “Douglas was 16 at the time, off to see the world with friends of his. First stop? Hong Kong. I let him go, I didn't want to be a helicopter parent; suffocating the poor kid like I was when my Earth mother raised me, sort of.” 

“That wasn't you?” The man asked, his tone was very different, sounding quite puzzled, amazed and surprised all at once with a short, simple question that begged confirmation. 

“No it wasn't.” Power Girl said flatly, her fists loosening up yet her fingers remained curled like talons on a falcon's feet. “That was Divine, a human-krypton hybrid. The first successful prototype that could use all of my powers without killing herself.” 

“I don't understand...” The man sounded confused, trying to make heads and tails out of contradicting facts. 

“Ever since I started... flaunting my stuff, my abilities to the public way back in the early '80's, men and women in seats of power freaked the fuck out.” Power Girl explained with a poorly masked tone of disgust. “After the initial panic, they simmered down and some dumb bitch motherfucker decided that I, or my abilities should be the next arms race. Nuclear weapons style, soaked in cold war flavours.” 

“Fast forward to March 2013, someone somewhere figures out what the hell Snowden is about to do. Whomever this is, freaks out and breaks the glass to push the biggest and reddest of panic buttons on the goddamn desk; Divine.” She motions the gestures of grabbing her hair with both hands in a fit of panic before punching into the air in front of her as she laid down her theory. 

Silence again, it sounds so deafening when it goes off like a bomb, overwhelming someone who had been spewing out words like machine gun fire, each word louder than the last. Power Girl's emotions starts to boil over into her body language as her steps become harder, like that of an angry march. Her arms sway at her sides, stiff and rigid, occasionally snapping and growling at the cape fluttering behind her. Shoulders are tense and her jaws are welded shut, wedging faintly from side to side as if trying to hold back some unusual harsh language in an uncomfortable loud volume. 

“She's sent to Hong Kong, kill Snowden and destroy everything. Who gives a shit if its public, right?” Power Girl starts snapping, hissing out words again in rapid succession like a pissed off snake biting into the air. “The people will blame Power Girl for it and we can use the fallout to shoehorn in our new super army of human-krypton hybrids. Brilliant! Someone give this man a medal and a fucking raise!” 

The last outburst ended with a dripping sarcasm that felt like a verbal oil spill from a super tanker. Deep breaths, slow breaths and Power Girl calmed herself again. A sniff, the kind one does to suck up the snot that starts building up in your nose just before the dam bursts and your eyes begins to leak tears. Power Girl still reeks of anger, but it is much calmer now. Underneath the burning anger is a ice cold ocean of regret, sorrow and mourning. Maybe it's not even an ocean, maybe it's closer to a glacier creaking and scraping at the very bottom of Power Girl's humanity. 

“Douglas and his friends lived at the same hotel.” Power Girl said, failing to hold back the first two tears as they trekked down her cheeks. “There were no survivors, they got sliced up by Divine's heat vision.” 

“Wasn't that lasers? I mean, you could see the beam and everything.” The man asked, the question plopping itself out of his mouth before his brain managed to scramble to the forefront of his attention like a middle manager late for a meeting, only to scold him for his stupidity. 

“It's heat, all heat. You see the beam for the same reason you see a bolt of lighting; shit is so hot it turns the air into plasma.” Power Girl said with a faint smile, stopping the second tear with a gentle poke with her finger. 

“How did you take it?” The man asked with a small voice, though the answer should be painfully obvious. 

“Shock, awe, denial... the usual. Odd to see things from the other side, if you will.” Power Girl admitted, her eyes rolling as if to catch a glimpse of that moment in some tucked away corner of her mind. “My jaw hit the bottom of the Mariana Trench when I first saw it on the news. After gaping at the TV for a good minute or so, a word caught my attention; Hong Kong.” 

“I gave Douglas a call, just to check in.” Power Girl said, a bitter and sad smile held a faint chuckle back. “No one answered. It's cool, I told myself. Hong Kong is big, Douglas is probably just in the subway or some dumb shit.” 

Power Girl stopped, biting her lip and forcing a smile while carefully shaking her head side to side ever so slightly, as if trying to gently dust off a bad dream. A deep breath, shaking and uneven. When words started rolling of her tongue again, her voice cracked and almost burst with tears. 

“When the beep tone for leaving a voice mail rang, it went on forever. That's when the hotel name came up on the screen. When I snapped out of it, I was less than a kilometre away from mainland Hong Kong. Traveling at Mach 24 does that.” She said, the forced smile loosing ground to curled lips of despair. 

Tears tinkled down her cheeks, like fat drops of rain they dripped off her chin and Power Girl stopped walking. Sniffs, deep snorts, trembling shoulders and a ragged breath made her look so small, tiny almost, despite her 6 feet tall muscular frame wrapped in a formfitting white suit and a blood red cape to match. Power Girl hid her face behind the back of her wrists, trying to calm herself, swipe away the tears and make an effort not to smear snot all over her suit. 

“My baby boy, my poor Douglas...” Power Girl whimpered with a small voice. “Sliced in half by a plasma beam, from thigh to armpit. 16 years old... he wanted to become a librarian, even had a crush on a girl who turned him down...” 

Closing her eyes, Power Girl raised her face to the blazing sun that hung high in the sky, her facial expression shifting between a calm composure and simmering emotions. Slow, deep belly breaths followed and she was calm again. If it weren't for the bloodshot eyes, tear washed cheeks and fresh, moist snot on her upper lip no one would think she had just cried her heart out. Running her fingers through her hair, Power Girl let out a sigh. Her pose had shifted again, no longer tall, strong and confident, yet not shivering in sadness and despair either. There was a feeling of a helpless indifference to past regrets, almost as if she'd stopped giving a damn about anyone or anything. It was only on a closer inspection that her eyes betrayed her; she did give a damn, a whole fucking galaxy worth by the looks of it. 

“I buried my Douglas, cremated him actually.” She started speaking the moment she picked up her next step on the lonesome desert road. “Then... I was a lot like you are now; angry, scared and dancing on the edges of insanity with grief as my dancing partner. I hunted down those son's of bitches and come November, I struck them down with everything I had.” 

There was a freezing chillness to Power Girl's last words, sound more like a low growl at the depths of her throat rather than the more normal speech of a emotionally stable individual. Her eyes also seemed to have some burning passion or desperate hunger to them, though the glare did not linger. It shifted away almost as swiftly as it had arrived and when Power Girl gave the man a sideways glance, they appeared calm and rational, if not a little embarrassed. 

“Why did you wait 8 months? Why not hit them right away?” The man asked, his voice loaded like a gun, ready to fire off another round of blame and finger-pointing judgment with hindsight precision. 

“The human-krypton hybrid project was above top secret. I had jack shit to work with, not to mention that I drank an Olympic sized swimming pool worth of booze in hopes of drowning my sorrows, nightmares and personal hell hole with something, anything that would actually make sense.” Power Girl's protest was about as loaded as the man's question, only she had a bigger gun. “Sobering up, suiting up and digging around for names, faces, places... shit takes time. Reality is not like in the comics, let alone movies.” 

Looking up ahead the gas station had come into view, the man was starting to sway and taking an occasional stagger rather than a step as the sun and the desert heat was starting to take their toll on him. Power Girl seemed fine, at least physically yet she too stood out as worn and tired. It had been a long walk; sore feet, socks that felt that they would catch fire any second, shirt soaked in sweat and a dry thirst smeared all over the inside of his mouth like a thick coat of paint. A question lingered in the back of his mind, one that might give him some sense of closure. 

“Why Dunseith?” It slipped out off his tongue like a slug. 

“I found Divine and fought her.” Power Girl began. “She had everything I had, expect control, finesse and experience. If I was to fight her and win, I needed to go all out. There was no way I could do that anywhere near a large city.” 

“So I smacked her as hard as I could, forcing her north. She landed in Dunseith and we had a grapple there before I got a solid hold on her and we took our fight to the Canadian arctic archipelago, where I killed her.” Her explanation was as sound and logical as her tone of voice, but offered little comfort or closure. “The poor girl thought she could go on forever, failing to realize that A, she was a hybrid and could store less energy compared to a fully fledged Kryptonian and B, if you go that far north at that time of year, you're stuck in a polar night, largely devoid of sunlight.” 

They arrived at the gas station, the man still angry and upset. While he could mobilize some shreds of sympathy and empathy for Power Girl's story, it could just have been a tall tale and a grotesquely beautiful web of lies for all he knew. Even if it was true, he still had a hard time giving Power Girl a get out of jail card for what she'd done. He was not in any position to just forgive and forget, not a day had gone by the past 2 years and he'd forgotten. 

“When I was younger...” Power Girl started talking again, sounding more like an afterthought or mild musing. “I loved camping. I'd pack up and fly deep into Canada's wilderness during the summer, far away from the hustle and bustle of the city and its residents. Train; learn about my powers, my abilities, myself.” 

“The peace and quiet; I adored it, cherished it like every moment was something I could squeeze and hold on to.” There was a real sense of fondness to her voice. “I never fit in with you folks, there was always something... off. I was never one of you and for all your millions of people, not one of you were like me.” 

“Once I started with heroics, I stopped camping.” Power Girl's voice sank with a gloom. “The peace was there no more, the quiet was a goddamn curse. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw their faces; scared, terrified faces. Eyes big as frying pans; begging, pleading: don't let me die, save me. Too much silence made their dying words scrape around inside my ears like goddamn cockroaches. Prays unanswered, pleas unheeded and curses spat at me in utter despite.” 

She turned to look at the man, her face serious and sad. A defeated sense of regret seemed to affect her pose, yet she did her best to put up a brave front. A bitter, sad smile of defeat coloured her lips. 

“It's only words, but words are all I have.” She said, speaking from the heart. “I'm sorry about your sister and your niece. I'm sorry I didn't see her face or hear her voice, for it is only fair that both should have been added to my burden.” 

A warm breeze slipped across the land, making old rusty signs sway back and forth, its hinges groaning in protest. Power Girl slid her blond hair behind her ear, gently holding it in place while patiently waiting for the breeze to pass. Again her cape flapped and fluttered in the wind, sounding much like a flag eager to join the escapades of the wind. 

“How do you do it?” The man asked. “How do you keep on going?” 

“There is a cave on Bouvet Island. I dug it out with my bare hands and heat vision of the years.” Power Girl admitted with a sheepish grin. “Whenever I fucked up, failed to save some kid or let some poor soul drown, I flew down to Bouvet Island and threw a tantrum; screaming, punching and kicking to my hearts content. Then I cried until the tears would run dry and burn their name into the wall along with the date of their death.” 

“Why...?” The man asked Power Girl. 

“I heard a while back that people die twice; first you die the physical death and then you die when your name is spoken for the last time.” She explained. “Those poor, unfortunate souls who died their first death because of my failure will live on in my memory. I'll speak their names and remember their faces. And when my time comes, I'll beg for their forgiveness.”


End file.
